As some of you may now be thinking, hasn’t he already written a post about golf? Yes I have. I love golf, and apparently Peter (our instructor) does too. In response to the season drawing to an end I thought I would do one last post about golf and go into depth a little more about Wildwinds Golf Links (a company I used to work for) and share some of my experiences there working with our social media. Specifically, I want to talk about our use of Facebook to target customers. This has been one of our biggest successes and it deserves to be considered in detail.

What We Did

Now most companies these days have a Facebook page – this is great. It is essential to have one as it often includes pictures of your product or service, location information, contact details. It also can act as a source of coupons, promotional information, new product launches, and as a space for customers to interact with the company. At Wildwinds we have a Facebook page like this. However, this is where most companies stop. Maybe because they don’t know what else Facebook can do, don’t understand how to actually do it, or perhaps they are worried about making a mistake.

Facebook is a brilliant marketing and advertising tool, especially for small businesses. It is much more than just a social network. It is very important to develop a strong following through page ‘likes’, however this is not 100% necessary to take advantage of Facebook for advertising. In order to use Facebook to advertise it is very simple. There are two main ways that we used Facebook at Wildwinds:

1) Boosted Posts: This is very simple – we create a normal Facebook post about something happening at the course or a promotion we had running (these are the basic posts that are found on the wall of all pages) . Boosting it refers to when we pay any amount of money to have it advertised to people by showing up in their newsfeed. The real value of this is in the demographic targeting that Facebook allows for. Here is Jeff Baldwin (myself) with a quick explanation on how this works in the form of an audio clip:

Amazing right? Our owners thought so. The ROI on this specific ad we did was over 10,000%. Yes, 10,000%. We spent $10 and as a result received over $1,000 in revenue directly from people booking for the tournament based on the ad they saw on Facebook. This rate of return is unheard of in virtually all other aspects of business. The beauty of something like this is that it really works for any budget – prices start at only $1 and you can go as high as you like – the more you pay the more people your boosted post will reach! If you are worried about it or simply want to do some trial and error, then start with something small and learn as you go what the best practice is!

According to our General Manager, (Scott MacKay) “the new social media tactics and tools we started employing unlocked huge amounts of potential revenue for our company… to be honest we hardly spend anything on traditional media anymore because it just doesn’t get anywhere close to the same return that Facebook (and others) are getting for us”.

2) The second option for advertising on Facebook is through traditional digital advertising. This uses the exact same targeting techniques as the previous example, however you do not need to create a post for this – you simply create the add. It all depends on what works for your business and for the unique requirements of each campaign. This add would appear in the newsfeed, on the right column, in a banner, or else where that Facebook ads are found. It is very simple to set one up and is quite effective. We used one in the past to advertise our ability to host golf tournaments. We spend $50 advertising this service we provide and as a result got a tournament signed up that brought in over $8,000 in revenue for the course. Here is a video that was created and sent to me by someone from this tournament:

Now it’s likely that those who are reading this do not work at a golf course. However, the value of Facebook advertising is transferable to almost every type of business – like I said, especially small ones due to the ability to target in specific geographic areas and specific niche interests/hobbies/behaviours. Next time you are thinking about paying for traditional marketing, why not take 20 bucks and give Facebook a try. You’ll be glad you did!

Although the golf season may be coming to an end, we certainly have beautiful days like this (below) to look forward to again next spring!

Lesson Learned

1) Social media like Facebook can be accessible for everyone – regardless of technical skills

2) Social media advertising is affordable for every budget – anything from $1 up will get you a basic social media campaign

3) Because of the vast databases of demographic information that social media sites store, they are able to target better than most traditional mediums (and at a MUCH lower cost)